Love, Reason, Beauty

Love is a joyful and useful activity that encompasses wellness and feelings of well-being.Sri Sri Ravishankar Ji: Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.

Love has a stress-reducing and health-promoting potential, since it carries the ability to heal or facilitate beneficial motivation and behavior.

Human attachment seems to employ a push–pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward of motivation and exhilaration.

Love has at its basis a concept – that of UNITY, a state in which, at the height of passion, the desire of lovers is to be united to one another and to dissolve all distance between them. When deeply in love, we suspend those critical judgments that we otherwise use to assess people.

Reason:

It is not surprising that we are often surprised by the choice of partner that someone makes, asking futilely whether they have taken leave of their senses. In fact, they have.

Love is often irrational because rational judgments are suspended or no longer applied with the same rigor.

Euphoria and suspension of judgment can lead to states that others might interpret as madness.

Nietszche: ‘‘There is always some madness in love. But, there is always some reason in madness’’.

Blaise Pascal: ‘‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’’.

Beauty:

Throughou- t history, from the days of Plato onwards, the path to love has been described as being through beauty.

Dante falls in love with Beatrice because he finds her beautiful, and longs to see that which is hidden in her physique.Majnu, in his love for Leila, is obsessed by her beauty, even if she does not seem beautiful to others. ‘‘To see her beauty’’, he declares, ‘‘you must borrow my eyes’’.

The Lord Krishna ‘‘steals the mind’’ with his beauty.

Gibran: Beauty is not in the face; it is a light in the heart.

Excerpts from Neurobiology of Love by S. Zeki, University College, London, UK